Federal Government = Bush Campaign HQ

So I got curious when I saw Josh Marshall’s post yesterday about the House Committee on Resources using its public web space to bash Kerry (they continue to do so as I write), and I took a look around to see what some other committees were up to. I didn’t find anything nearly as blatant, but the Committee on Education and the Workforce certainly straddles the line. Its front page blares the headline:

“Public Support Rock-Solid for ‘No Child Left Behind’ at Two-Year Mark.”

That struck me as funny, since this morning when I googled the bill, the headlines were exclusively things like:

Take a google for yourself, see if I’m wrong. So I decided to look into the “polling” institution, Americans for a Better Education. Go take a look at them too, it won’t take you long since there is essentially no information whatsoever on their site except links to these polls. Curiouser and curiouser. Then, after some scrounging, I found a very nice Public Citizen report on Ed Gillespie that said the following:

“Earlier, Gillespie set up another corporate coalition to back Bush’s ‘No Child Left Behind’ education program. Americans for Better Education – which includes companies like AT&T, Pfizer, Microsoft and Instinet (the latter two both Gillespie clients) – raised over $1 million and ran ads in more than a dozen Congressional districts. Gillespie arranged a meeting between coalition members and White House officials. Americans for Better Education also paid Quinn Gillespie $100,000 for the services of lobbyist Mark Lampkin in 2001.” Public Citizen June 2003 Report

As for the poll itself, the main Democratic problem with the program (which had a great deal of Democratic support at passing) has always been the underfunding of the bill, which now stands at $27 billion all told, and that fact is, well, conspicuously absent.

See this week’s @Stake story on the so-called “Education President” to see what this underfunding is doing across the country, and why that google comes out the way it does.